Joe Biden was going to be the saviour of the world. Mr Cool, Mr Sensible, he was going to bring back the safety and sanity that America and the world had been missing so dreadfully during the Trump era. He was going to “Build Back Better”. He was going to restore normality and stability. The media, always derisive of President Trump, hung off Biden’s every word. Just think of the difference in the way they treat his pathetic press secretary, Jen Psaki, compared to their open derision of Trump’s press secretaries who never got a chance – nor did President Trump himself.
But seven months in, the US media are now questioning and openly deriding Biden himself. Now he is no longer the cool president in Aviators eating ice-cream. He is too old and has a reduced mental capacity. He always was, but now, at last, they are facing up to it.
And how many Americans have lost their lives, livelihoods or family members because Biden was given a free ride?
You can see the change in his demeanour. Being the darling of the press made him feel invincible, unlike the other guy. But that lack of scrutiny has led, at least in part, to the awful situation that Americans and others face in Afghanistan. Maybe if he’d ever had to answer a few hard questions, he might have questioned his own judgment, just once or twice. But that’s the thing about being invincible. You are always right.
Until you are not.
Now he scuttles back and forth, terrified of being asked questions he cannot answer. He is no longer allowed to get away with blaming Trump. The media wants answers from their golden boy, and all they now see is a geriatric, stripped bare of the aura that the press so readily gave to him. By the look of things, he may not last the year.
The NZ media are just as guilty as the US journalists. They hang off Ardern’s every word, ask only the easy questions, treat her like a goddess and deride the opposition for everything they do. Judith Collins can do nothing right, can gain no traction, because the media will not allow it.
But it is not the job of the media to be sycophants. They are supposed to report the news and ask the questions that keep us informed.
In our current situation, the media are starting to ask a few more questions about the government’s plan to eventually bring us back to the world, and to question their proficiency over the vaccine programme and the emergence of the Delta variant. But like in the USA, they find that they have created a monster. Ardern is not used to answering tough questions. She runs and hides, just like she did from Mike Hosking. She prefers answering soft questions about Neve, the wedding or which earrings she is going to wear today.
Do you not think that, if the media had been a little harder on her from the beginning, she would be better prepared in her interviews, and she might have been more measured in her decisions? After all, there must have been a lot of comfortable cabinet meetings recently, knowing that whatever they decide, the media will just go along with it without question. Jacinda Ardern has become used to this environment, and her true flakiness has not been on public display because the media have covered it up for her… just as the US media have done with Joe Biden until now.
It is clear that the media are beginning to ask a few more questions of Jacinda now. As lockdown fatigue kicks in, as more and more stories come out about police brutality towards people doing nothing more serious than refusing to wear a mask, the public is starting to see that we have less freedom than communist China and they may be wondering how it has come to this.
As we have fallen from the best place in the world to be in the pandemic to a position several points below the USA, New Zealanders really are wondering what happened, but it is too late now. Our sycophantic marionette media have done the New Zealand public a great disservice by giving Jacinda Ardern an easy ride and blocking out anything from the opposition. Ardern thought she could get away with anything. By now, she is probably not so sure, but she’ll press on anyway.
It is not the media’s role in our society to influence outcomes by adoring a particular politician and deriding the opposition. That is how dictatorships are made. The media here are responsible for the shambolic handling of the pandemic, just as the American media are responsible for the pathetic puppet of a president they are now encumbered with.
Just think. Had the media done their job properly, we might not have had the current outbreak, as problems with frontline workers not being vaccinated, or MIQ breaches might have been solved sooner. The media do not get a free ride on this. Once and for all, they need to do their job and do it properly. We only have to look to the other side of the Pacific to see what happens when they fail, and it isn’t pretty. Leaders should not be made or broken by journalists. It is time the journalists got back into line.
Please share this article
